Future of energy industry in Asia. How HR innovation will solve talent shortages to fill key posts and ensure energy industry projects are completed on time. Keys to change management, motivation, better team performance, lower staff turnover, fewer vacancies and more agile workforce. How to attract the best talent from competing energy companies. Future of oil and gas industry. Shortage of skilled workers in alternative energies, coal, gas, nuclear power. Strategies for a more sustainable future. Patrick Dixon is a conference keynote speaker and co-author of SustainAgility. Presentation for Urban Forum in Malaysia. Every HR challenge and every HR-related global trend is related in our increasingly hyper-connected world so it is hard to list just three challenges in isolation. Here are three issues that closely mesh together.
1. Rapid changes in the global energy markets
2. Rapid changes in national energy strategies in Asia
3. Rapid changes in Asia labour markets / urban migration / demographics
The fact is that global energy strategies, which must be built on related HR strategies, are being overtaken by events. The world is changing faster than you can hold a board meeting. A 20 second earthquake in Japan triggered a 40 year change in energy policy in Japan and Germany with far reaching global consequencies for the oil and gas work force. That means a completely new approach to strategy: the days of having only one strategy are over. Agility requires parrallel strategic thinking.
2. The O&G/Energy industry by its nature tends to recruit and promote technical and professional specialists into managerial and leadership positions because they are experts in their specialist subjects, but quite often their leadership/management capabilities are left underdeveloped. This can result in highly logical managers being very good with numbers and science but not particularly good at the things which motivate and encourage people. What are your thoughts on this?
The challenge happens both ways round: world-class specialists with less developed leadership skills, and world class leaders with less developed specialist understanding. We need both. Oil and gas industry leaders can learn from other industries such as law, accounting and financial services where history has proven how dangerous it is to build organisations on data , elaborate forecasts and so on, without close attention to how team members feel, whether they believe in what they are doing, and whether they like being at work.
I work with many groups of highly analytical leaders to develop their wider people skills. The key is to help each leader understand (often to their surprise) just how often their own personal, day to day decisions are influenced by “soft” emotional factors, and how they can use that understanding to achieve outstanding team performance.